Collected Works of Erasmus, Volume II: The Correspondence of Erasmus, Letters 142 to 297 (1501 to 1514) trans. by R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson (review)

374 LETTERS IN CANADA reminded with Walter Benjamin that poetic understandings hidden against the orthodox grain of history are often the important ones. A certain positivist streak besets the historian of ideas who is obedient to patterns of influence of treatise upon treatise. Taking a wider positivism, however, the study might have noticed the way in which recent neuroanatomy confirms some of the hunches of antiquity about the inward wits. The division of the soul into vegetative, sensitive, and rational functions predicts the triple structure of brainstem , controlling involuntary activity, limbic brain, the source of sexual and aggressive responses and elementary emotions, and the neo-cortex· with its capacity for speech, memory, and abstract reasoning. The image -making phantasia as it works with the spatializing cognitio seems to anticipate the discovery of the split brain. Might not these findings feed curiosity about the inward powers, for like the ancients modern thinkers attempt to reconcile philosophy and biology in an effort to search the middle ground where being and system become each other's metaphors. (SEAN KANE) Collected Works ofErasmus, Volume II: The Correspondence ofErasmus, Letters 142 to 297(1501 t01514). TranslatedbyR.A. B.MynorsandD.F. S. Thomson; annotatedby Wallace K. Ferguson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1975, xiv, 374, $25.00 .Erasmian scholars - and indeed even scholars who are not buckled to Erasmian interests - will welcome the second volume of the letters and will appreciate again (or still) the sustained and witty scholarship of the translation by Sir Roger Mynors and Professor D.F.S. Thomson and the annotations by Professor Wallace K. Ferguson. Erasmus himself sets forth (in Epistles 182 and 188, and as a kind of apologia first for Valla's mode of translating and then for his own) what _ amounts to a paradigm for all translations, demanding both the grace and freedom of the idiomatic and creative translation and the accuracy of the literal. He himself would rather, he says, 'hug the shore' of accuracy than risk shipwreck in freer waters; yet it is the Muses he calls on for help, and for the high wisdom of Oedipus and the Delian prophet that he prays; and from such pleas and prayers one gathers that mere accuracy is not enough. Those who have enjoyed the rhythms of the prose in the first volume, its smooth fluency, its points and sallies and pungent wit, will not be disappointed in this volume. And what was so evident in the editorial achievement of the first volume - that the meat of Allen's notes and introductions was used with economy and precision and expanded where later scholarship was available - could be said again and with new enthusiasm about Volume II. Usually the editorial notes are more succinct than those in the Latin texts, but some in this volume are very full HUMANITIES 375 indeed; and sometimes introductory notes become little essays illuminating not just the following letter but a whole sequence of events pertinent to it; and it is no small thing to have history presented with such immediacy. One might cite, for instance, the introduction to Epistle 164, concerning the Enchiridion, its writing, its publishers, its patrons, and its problems; or the headnote to a letter to Ammonio (Ep 255) summarizing the decisions and revisions, hopes and disappointments clustering around the living at Aldington and Erasmus's short tenure of it. One can almost reconstruct the whole turbulent reign of Pope JuliusII from the letters themselves together with the introductory notes and annotations. The editorial use of, and expansion of, Allen's introductions can be seen easily in a letter to Mountjoy (Ep 211) about a new edition of the adages. Allen had provided the reader with valuable information about the Aldine press, its hospitable owner, and Erasmus's enjoyment of, and reaction to, that hospitality; and Professor Ferguson summarizes all this, then brings the letter and the work on the adages into the bright ambience of the two adages and one colloquy which are so germane to the event and are now easily available in English - in Mrs Phillips's translations (The Adages of Erasmus, Cambridge 1964) and those of Professor Craig Thompson (The Colloquies of Erasmus, Chicago 1965...